Recently I was tasked with adding a field to the cash on delivery gateway in WooCommerce. They wanted a field they could put in a dollar amount that would be tacked on as a fee to orders using that gateway. Seemed simple enough with some googling but took a bit longer to tweak and get functioning correctly.

Add Field to Cash On Delivery Gateway

Adding fields in WooCommerce to its forms is pretty straight forward. You hook into the WC Settings API and adjust them using this hook:

Replace <id> with the id of the form. In this case it’s “cod” for the Cash on Delivery form. In your hooked function you can manipulate the form fields array as needed. For my case I just needed to add a field at the end for a fee so I do this:

Add Fee To The Order

Now that we have a fee set we need to hook into the checkout process. For this I use the action “woocommerce_checkout_create_order” to manipulate the order right before it’s saved. In WooCommerce 3.0 and over you no longer use the add_fee() function but instead create a line item fee object and add that to the order. Here’s how I did what I needed:

SUPER IMPORTANT

Notice the add_item( $item ) call to place it in the order. If that’s all you do then you will see the fee on the order but the order total won’t include it. You need to make sure you run the order’s calculate_totals() function after adding the item.

I’m building a site for a Japanese company. They need a Gravity Forms address field with a different order. I spent a BOATLOAD of time trying to get this working and I finally did. Here’s some details.

Extending Address Field

I started by extending the address field. Simple enough. Made some tweaks to the get_field_input() function to reorganize. Made sure all other functions that used the .1, .2, etc. id’s for the inputs inside the field were updated in my field class.

After some trial and error with those I got the form field to be in the admin so I could add it to a form. Awesome! Went to the front and there’s my new beautiful field. But no matter how hard I tried it would not save any of the data.

I searched and searched through all the hooks I could find related to this. I almost gave up but then I found a comment that said something about default inputs were loaded in js.php file.

JS.PHP

In the root directory of Gravity Forms is a file named js.php. This file runs a switch case on different field types and populates some data. If you look towards the bottom around line 838 at the writing of this post you will see:

<?php do_action( 'gform_editor_js_set_default_values' ); ?>

Right there you need to hook in your own default settings with field.inputs defined. That’s about it! I just copied the info they had for the address field, tweaked it to match my class’s data and voila.

I’ve just released the latest version of my plugin to the WordPress repo. You can now simply click a button to have a plain text version of the information copied to your clip board. Paste into an email or support forum with ease and no crazy html or code getting included.

My previous post about Give was an intro to building a payment gateway for the plugin. If you’ve built extensions for Give or are starting to then you’ve probably run into the settings fields API for adding a variety of inputs. The options are limited and there are often times a need for custom fields.

As you add settings to an array they will be displayed in the same order in a Give formatted html table. It appears they were using CMB2 but have since deprecated it. I’m not 100% sure but there are remnants of it in the plugin.

Creating A Custom Field

Within the output_fields function I mentioned above there is a switch statement on the field type. This goes through all the type options default in Give and outputs the field content based on type. After all the case type options the default is a sweet do_action( ‘give_admin_field_’ . $value[‘type’], $value, $option_value ); This is how you do what you want to do with a custom field.

One thing I really needed when building an extension was a way to have inter-woven sub headers for form options. I could not find a way to just output a title. The type field title that’s default to Give outputs the top of a table with it as it’s meant to be, that’s right, at the top lol.

Let’s start with an example of creating a simple sub title output.

Remember, the form settings fields are all in a table so you need to use a table row to output your field. Now we can add this subtitle between fields by using:

I’m not even going to link to the blog post they put up recently, but I’m sure you can find it if you want.

So a dude bought some plugins and in those plugins snuck some links/urls to spam sites he owns. Yes, it’s shady and awful practice. Is it illegal? No. Is it ok to call out the plugins so people ditch them? Absolutely.

But is it cool to post their full name a bunch of personal information and photos? FUCK NO. That is entirely uncalled for and fucked up.

This guy isn’t pushing malware. He’s not hacking your mainframe, bro. He’s doing some sleezy back linking shit. There is not a single thing about that which makes it appropriate for WF to put screen grabs of his LinkedIn profile on their post.

Wordfence is starting a witch hunt. I remember when those got banned on Reddit and you know why? Because it’s wrong. It can quickly escalate to mass harassment or worse. You don’t put up other people’s personal information on the web. Period.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that they had the gaul to put up a blog post like that.

I decided to learn Swift. I’ve always wanted to do some 3D game coding but have never taken the initiative learn a language that’s good for that. I’ve had some time in the evenings free up recently and took advantage.

Now I’m still learning Swift. I’ve only been messing with it for two weeks. My whole goal since starting has been to make a bimini ring toss game. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s popular in craft beer pubs. There’s a metal ring that hangs from the ceiling on a string. You pull the ring back and try to land it onto a hook on the wall.

SCNNode Shapes

There’s a few basic shapes provided in SceneKit that you can use to start building. I used a SCNTorus for the ring.

Like I said, I’m still learning, but here’s the gist of my understanding. SCNNodes are the visible objects you can manipulate in the 3D world. You add them to an SCNScene which is the world your 3D app lives in.

You can’t see the SCNNodes you add until they have shape so you need to build an SCNGeometry and add it to your SCNNode. The geometry can be built easily using some pre-built shapes like SCNTorus or SCNBox and a few sizing parameters.

Your nodes aren’t going to do much either until you add a SCNPhysicsBody to them. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the physics stuff but I get the basics which is all you need to build something like this rope. By making a physics body object and using .dynamic for type and nil for shape it just defaults physics boundaries to the shape of the node and interacts with other nodes that have physics bodies.

Faking A String

So googling “Swift 3D string” didn’t help me at all. Seeing as string is a global keyword for nearly every coding language, there were no results about an actual twine string being created in 3D.

I started looking for “rope” and found one codebase in c# that built a rope by chaining a bunch of cylinders together that had pivot joints connecting them. Made sense!

I want to learn Swift though, this meant I needed to build this functionality myself but at least I had a reference now. Let’s start by picking our shape. Since I wanted more of a string than a rope I went with spheres. The code example here has them bigger than they will be when the game is ready but it’s good for getting the functionality built.

I put this into a class. The full repo for this project can be downloaded and run in xcode 8 or newer. I create what I call links in the rope. I start with my base link called rope on init since it will be the main point of the whole object. Then I have a function for creating link nodes.

It’s important to note I’m using a radius of 0.1. I’m still not completely comfortable with these units, I’m trying to figure them out, but relatively they make sense.

Next, in the game’s main view controller I generate my rope and all the links in a loop and store them in an array called links. I do this because I wanted to add all my nodes to the scene in the same block of code. It’s not required to do that but I like the organization.

The SCNPhysicsBallSocketJoint class took me the longest to find and learn it’s what I need to connect all these pieces together. Implementing it correctly took me some time but the logic makes sense when you really think about it.

Coordinates in SceneKit

Your SCNScene object has coordinates for specific points in x, y and z format. x = horizontal line, y = vertical line and z = depth (near/far) line. Now your SCNNode’s ALSO have x, y and z coordinates for points on the actual node. This can get confusing so take your time getting positioning of objects correct.

For the objects, we don’t need to set a position. Everything will be spawned at 0, 0, 0 which is right in the middle. You should add a SCNFloor that’s got a -y position so when gravity turns on your objects don’t just drop down into nothingness.

SCNPhysicsBallSocketJoint requires two SCNNode’s passed to it and it needs a x,y,z point on each node to connect them together. So bodyA is our link and bodyB is the previous link created in the loop. Using an SCNVector3 object we build the x,y,z coordinates.

When nodes are created they default to having the coordinates 0,0,0 right in the middle of the object. Remember our spheres are 0.1 radius. That means we want out point of connection to be on the top of one sphere and bottom of the other. So we usr -0.05 on one link and 0.05 on the other link for x, y and z. Now that I think about it a radius is half the width of our sphere so this number should be 0.1 but 0.05 works so maybe I’m wrong about where the default point is. Needless to say, you will have to do some math and toy with these numbers.

When you build your joint you have to add it to the SCNScene as a behavior using the addBehavior() method.

Dive In

Finally, we add all of these items to the SCNScene as children and we are set. They all need to be child nodes of the same parent node, I use on called Holder that I created. It’s an empty node with no geography so you can’t see it, it’s just like a container to keep them all related to each other.

Check out the full repo and toy with it if you want. You can see that I have a ring object I attach to the end for my bimini game. I toy with mass on some nodes as I think that helps the ring feel heavier in the game world. I have a ceiling for attaching the rope and so on.

Did you get the below email after trying to submit your NativeScript iOS app to iTunes Connect?

Dear developer,

We have discovered one or more issues with your recent delivery for “#####”. To process your delivery, the following issues must be corrected:

This bundle is invalid – The Info.plist file is missing or could not be parsed. Please check it for embedded control characters.

Once these issues have been corrected, you can then redeliver the corrected binary.

Regards,

The App Store team

It can be really irritating but the fix is pretty simple. This happens when odd characters or weird adjustments are made dynamically to the plist.info file attached to your bundle. To get rid of this annoying rejection you should do a few things.

Make sure you are setting as much info as you can manually in your app/App_Resources/iOS/info.plist file. This file is used to generate the xcode.project file’s included plist. Avoid adjusting the generated plist.info file as much as possible and do this pre-emptively before each build including updating your CFBundleShortVersionString and CFBundleVersion keys to latest version.